Da Vinci: Bad Boy Of The Renaissance

December 11, 1991|By Reviewed by Ron Grossman, a Tribune writer.

Leonardo

By Serge Bramly

HarperCollins, 404 pages, $35

Leonardo da Vinci was the Orson Welles of the Italian Renaissance.

Like Hollywood`s perennial enfant terrible, Da Vinci always promised more than he delivered, which was no mean trick, considering that his ``Mona Lisa`` is probably the world`s most looked-at painting. Yet to the day he died, his contemporaries thought that Da Vinci`s real masterpieces were still in front of him.

In fact, like Welles, Da Vinci is known almost as much for what he didn`t accomplish as for the tiny handful of works he left behind. According to Serge Bramly, his latest biographer, only 13 paintings by his hand have survived. In addition, we have seven others that he either worked on while still an apprentice in the studio of his master, Verrocchio, or that Da Vinci`s students painted according to cartoon outlines he set for them.

``At the same time, he is seen as one of the most ingenious and prolific of minds,`` Bramly observes. ``Set against the small number of paintings is the extraordinary (sometimes overwhelming) number of notebooks, revealing the dazzling activity of the man of science, the engineer, the writer (indeed the term `Leonardo complex` has recently been coined).``

Complex indeed: Da Vinci has always fascinated scholars with a taste for psychology because the one thing that his famous notebooks lack are introspective hints into what made him tick. Although he frequently commented in his notebooks on how love makes the world go round, he tells us almost nothing of his own emotional life. As a young man, he was brought up on charges of sodomy. From that episode, plus the fact that he never married, some historians conclude that, like his younger rival, Michelangelo, Da Vinci was homosexual. Other critics dissent, however.

Bramly is persuaded by two clues: In his notebooks, Da Vinci drew nude sketches of both sexes. But his pen was abstract when depicting the female anatomy, while his male figures, as Bramly puts it, are lovingly detailed

``from the navel down.`` In later life, Da Vinci adopted a young boy, who stayed on in his household, first as a servant, later as an apprentice, though he showed no particular talent. In his diary, Da Vinci is always reproaching the boy for his misdeeds in terms that approach those of an injured lover.

``Leonardo obviously had a weakness for bad boys with pretty faces,``

Bramly notes.

He also had a weakness for overambitious projects. For years, he promised his patron, Duke Sforza of Milan, that he would honor him with an equestrian statue cast in bronze on a scale that no other artist had dared to try. When Da Vinci produced a clay model, contemporaries were stunned by the living likeness of its finely detailed anatomy. Alas, the statue itself was never produced, for even Da Vinci`s fertile mind never solved the problem of how to cast such a large figure, given the technology available during the Renaissance.

Toward the end of his life, Da Vinci himself seems to have realized that his particular genius could be as much a trap as an asset to an artist. Indeed, he left a trenchant analysis of the problem of creativity that could serve as an epitaph for the perennially fascinating Da Vinci himself.

``Like a kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom,`` Da Vinci wrote,

``the mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.``